The Tally Stick

Lost in the wilderness: subjugation, survival, and the meaning of family Up on the highway, the only evidence that the Chamberlains had ever been there was two smeared tire tracks in the mud leading into an almost undamaged screen of bushes and trees. No other cars passed that way until after dawn. By that time the tracks had been washed away by the heavy rain. After being in New Zealand for only five days, the English Chamberlain family had vanished into thin air. The date was 4 April 1978. In 2010 the remains of the eldest child are discovered in a remote part of the West Coast, showing he lived for four years after the family disappeared. Found alongside him are his father's watch and what turns out to be a tally stick, a piece of scored wood marking items of debt. How had he survived and then died in such a way? Where is the rest of the family? And what is the meaning of the tally stick?

About the Author :
Carl Nixon was born in Christchurch in 1967 and is one of New Zealand's leading authors. His books regularly appear on New Zealand's bestselling fiction lists and have been listed for international awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book (South East Asia and Australasia region), and the Dublin International IMPAC Awards. He has adapted for the stage Lloyd Jones's novel The Book of Fame and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. The Tally Stick, his latest novel, was on the New Zealand fiction bestseller list for six months and has been shortlisted for the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Awards. Preparations for a screen adaptation are underway.

Review :
Praise for The Tally Stick "Nixon's prose is arresting ... which generates consistent appeal for the thrilling and emotionally nuanced story. This is electrifying." --Publishers Weekly, *starred review* "From its first sentences, The Tally Stick by Carl Nixon swept me up and carried me away to a world I never knew and a place I've never been: New Zealand's West Coast, a rough and rugged place where after just five days in the country the Chamberlain family completely disappears. But more than the impeccably described landscape, it's the complicated moral choices the characters must confront that makes this novel so much more than a gripping story of loss and survival. Richly drawn, intensely atmospheric, and absolutely stunning, I loved this book!" --KAREN DIONNE, author of the #1 international bestseller The Marsh King's Daughter and The Wicked Sister "Nixon's evocation of physical landscape and its interior counterpart resonate long in the memory." --The Times "An atmospheric thriller, this is the Kiwi version of outback noir and I couldn't put it down."--The Observer "There's a steady relentlessness to the action in the bent fairy tale of Carl Nixon's fourth novel ... Nixon sketches in aspects of his characters' lives deftly." --Newsroom "The writing in The Tally Stick is evocative, you can smell the native bush, see the birds, feel the soggy forest floor. There is much that the reader must fill in for themselves. It is a read full of conflict, violence, and dread, but there is also beauty and kindness, and the switching back and forth gives it an inevitability that puts the characters in the frame of a morality play." --ALYSON BAKER, Nelson Public Libraries "Carl Nixon is one of my favorite New Zealand writers. I love his stuff ... This latest novel is very cinematic ... I would place it firmly amongst what's called a literature of unease ... very ominous, very foreboding, it's all about the atmosphere ... The prose also does a really interesting thing with time, in that it lingers over instance ... The writing is very powerful." --Radio New Zealand "I like that the novel tests this Eurocentric notion of 'the wild, ' and that it clearly looks to other dominant forms of narrative, not least the ambivalence of New Zealand Gothic. But it challenges our expectations of genre, and in doing so engages with thorny questions about the nature of our relationships with one another." --The Spinoff "The Tally Stick is an efficient, gripping story, a Kiwi Gothic thriller that is confidently and economically told. It is probably Nixon's strongest novel." --PHILIP MATTHEWS, Academy of New Zealand Literature "The Tally Stick unravels a yarn of acceptance, denial, love and resentment. There are many subtle investigations into why people behave as they do, and how simple but necessary choices affect everything. Every event and every conversation is essential to the plot with the things left unsaid and unexplained as the most powerful moments that will leave the reader thinking about the moral rights and wrongs of this story for some time to come. This is the best kind of novel: complex, contemplative, upsetting, written with an ease and flow that makes it a compelling read." --LOUISE WARD, Wardini Books "The Tally Stick is a novel of character and edge-of-the-seat suspense, with the landscape and weather of the West Coast of New Zealand given a prominent role." --Weekend Herald